How I got started on space sims

I'm a Wing Commander nut. My parents once bought me a state of the art, $4000 (Canuckbuck) Intel 486DX33 with a whopping 8MB of RAM and a massive 120+MB hard drive, complete with DOS 6 and Windows 3.1. Man, was I the king of the geek hill. Of course, at the time, I didn't know squat about IBM PCs. I just ported over from Amiga (ah… I wish I had that still =)

But ladies and gentlemen, did that top of the line PC ever suck. Its sound was horrible (PC Speaker? You have to BUY a sound card?) The screen was tiny (15"?!), and I had no way of connecting it to the big old 31" TV, like I could my dear Amiga.

I love those spouts of flame

she's in her death throes

Within a short while, the native Windows games bored me, the stuff I got from friends sucked, and I became very disillusioned by this so-called superior computer…

And then, a miracle happened. My mother bought me a game, said that the guy at the store loved it, and I was like "oh… great." My initial instinct was to toss it aside (I mean, come on, my mother bought it!) But the cover looked interesting, despite the kind of cheesy name…

Wing Commander

What a stupid title! Who's this Chris Roberts guy anyway! Jeez, give me Sid Meier and Pirates! any day… just on my Amiga, of course.

can someone pass me a tissue

and maybe some shades

Of course, as you know after that brilliant setup, the heavens layed a mighty smackdown on my arrogant ass. First, I had to figure out how to load the game - it wasn't Windows… After weeks and weeks (no, I'm not exaggerating here) of painful smashing my head against the brick wall that was the "out of memory" error, I finally figured it out (1 incomplete hard drive format, 2 botched DOS installations, and 30 attempts at playing Wing Commander from the diskettes later…) Yes, you could play Wing Commander from the diskettes. It's just that the amount of floppy switching was insane.